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Help me play through the Final Fantasy franchise

I've been wanting to do this for a long time. Start at 1, end at 15, hit them all in short order without my usual focus on 100% completion, but rather a start to finish ride to take in all the story lines.

Two conditions:

It has to be available on PC

I really really really don't want to touch those weird-looking chibi remakes of FF2 and FF3. The closer to the originals, the better. I'm not sure that's an option with 2 or 3 except by way of a fan translation. Any alternatives or good resources for that?

Are the updated versions of 5 and 6 worth it or should I just dig up ROMs?

Was FF12 never released on PC? I don't see it for sale on the Square-Enix website, but that's pretty odd given every other title since 7 has been.

Are 11 and 14 capable of being experienced as a standard game with a fairly linear plotline, or are they open world exploration types that you can never really get a feel for without investing 100+ hours?

Lo and behold, the only way to play 12 is on emulator. They never released it for PC (this might change with the remaster however)

Okay, so 1 and 2 are available as Dawn of souls for GBA. So again, emulator (1 and 2 are not available on pc as yet, like 12)

if you mean 2 (4) then yes chibi. and 3 (steam) is chibi also.

5 and 6 are good for the end game, so if you are just doing the story it's no different. In fact you wont notice any difference until after you defeat kefka. (apart from the graphics) Same also for 5. no difference until after you defeat xdeath

as far as 11, there are now 9(?) expansions.. it depends on what you want to do. 11 is really not story driven.. it wasn't when i was playing it. Though you do get cool cutscenes letting you know about the new expansions. Literally when you walk into certain areas. There is a narrative to follow, but you'll always be grinding to get to the next part in the story - it requires you to be at a certain level. This is the same for 14. If you go in for story, just following the main story quests is possible (they are seen by a crown symbol instead of the classic "ARR" looking quest icon, which is like a circle) But you may fall behind in levels to get to the end of the story - especially at low levels.

I would say you can experience 11 and 14 as standard game... i have a fc member doing that. (FC = free company, guilds) 11 and 14 are mmos, so they are huge games, with lots to do, and basically centred around team work - if you want to do the story you have to level a character from 1-50 to finish the story. There's a new expansion coming out, if you really poured into getting to the end of that, yeah easily 100 hours. I haven't done it fast, but i think my clock is at about 100 days playing. (time spent playing the game) However i'd say that the story can be done quickly if you just want to finish the first game. As mentioned before, main story quests are easy to identify

PPSSPP is the main psp emulator. I've played crisis core on that... just be sure the game works on it before trying to play. I think the emulation is pretty good but it's always safe to check what games work well on certain emulators.

Also, when you get to 14 let me know! i'm getting ready to get into stormblood. They actually have multi-server parties now. They even let you pass word protect it so only certain people can join it.

Will do! That might be a good year from now, because I'm currently still trying to read all of the Wheel of Time series before I even start this (going to be wrapping up book 8 of 14 soon) and then I intend to start from FF1, but I'll definitely let you know.

Btw, looking on google i found out that others have been complaining about 1 and 2 not being on pc. I don't know how long one of these would take - and they'd probably do the new treatment to it. As far as keeping to the originals, gba versions are kinda close. (no more classic battle screens or general 16 colour sprites)

For ff14, it is a really good story. The storyline takes you through most of the game. Meaning there are optional areas, but you get dungeons, primal fights (ifrit etc) and even fighting with npc characters. You get to fish, gather and mine (i think.. it's quite late though) You join a grand company (there are 3) which you can pursue to get more xp and better equipment... Battle chocobo... (it's optional but you unlock the quest for it as long as you sign up for the company) There's also some optional quest lines which are cool to the story too. Like gilgamesh and other characters. Yeah, and battles do get harder as you play through the story. So there's some very rewarding parts to it. I tried to be silent on the details. Hope that helps.

I guess I could be posting here instead of hijacking a random other thread.

Finished FF5 last night. I remember it being fairly dull compared to 4 and 6 as a kid, and I think that still holds. Exdeath is a very bland enemy. There's a heavy dose of forced tragedy with the NPCs--the NES cliche of "so-and-so just showed up at a critical game moment after having no plot relevance for the last five hours so this scene will be exactly them dying to aid the main party"--is alive and well. The music is certainly solid, but not consistantly on par with its immediate predecessor.

What I did like a lot, and didn't pick up on quite as much as a kid, was the sort of tenderness of the main cast. Unlike 4, where your party is changing constantly, we're back to the classic four players chosen by fate at the start of the game to be your champions without much variance. But here an effort was made to show them stepping up into their role. The original partnership is viable; there's a good reason for them to all wind up together besides being the "chosen ones". While Butz eventually falls prey to the "destiny" cheese in his backstory, he mostly just functions as an average Joe who got caught up by chance in a quest to save the world. I think that approach is a lot more compelling, and they develop it in him.

There's a lot of formality going on in FF4 (especially in the original English translation I chose to roll with), and there's strong support for it. The characters had an established professional relationship going into the game, and they were nobles more inclined to express themselves at some distance. It worked, for 4. In 5, Square does a good job of selling the cast as a more casual band of soldiers. There are endless scenes of them just having fun together and growing progressively more comfortable with each other as they transition from strangers to seasoned veterans. Butz isn't some icon of the ideal warrior. He's just a dude. Enjoys throwing a few back after a long day's journey; gawks at women all the time in a way you might expect from a country bumpkin (as opposed to say, Edge in FF4); playfully picks on his partners when they make mistakes; is kind of a dick to animals (maybe not the most directly endearing quality, but it certainly helped give him a distinct flavor that fit his broader mold). Family matters; the characters have functional relationships with their family, and as tragedy strikes the game develops a more authentic sense of grief in them. Sometimes they just act in impulsive rage at what's happening around them. It's a far cry from the stone-cold determination to rise to all adversity that you see earlier in the franchise. It progresses. By the last few deaths, they aren't even trying to pull themselves together. You can feel their morale tanking more and more as things go on; they aren't "rising to the challenge", they're just pressing on because they have no other option. Square never tries to cheese a romantic engagement out of Butz either, despite that he's surrounded by women. He's too dejected and pissed off by the tragedy engulfing him to think of his partners as anything but friends. Once again a sharp contrast to FF4, where the cast felt more like hardened fighters accustom to death coming into it and could get over the hump relatively quickly.

I dunno, I'm not going to say the character development was better than FF4's. It's more like 4 took an old trope where characters weren't even important enough to have names and infused them with personality, whereas here they're trying something brand new for the series: all back stories aside, they made the characters normal people.

I don't mean to oversell it; they could have done a lot more. But relative to the previous games in the series, I felt the character development here was convincing and took a novel approach.

One point that's... not really a good or bad thing, but just something I noticed, is how much easier the game felt. Granted I did a lot of mindless grinding to get my skill points up, I don't think I ever felt challenged at any point outside of the non-mandatory boss fights, many of which were so intense that I didn't even bother (Shinryuu opened its fight hitting me for more than my max HP at level 61 with all skills maxed and 30% HP boost activated). I guess I could grind for hours to get my level high enough to beat him if I really wanted to win the best weapon in the game, but at that point I'd be 1-shotting the final boss even without it, so what's the point really?) I played FF4 easy (US SNES) type for translation purposes, and I still ran into a lot of bosses against which I had to actually take some caution and think about my choices. By the end of 5, I was using exactly X-Attack and Cure 3 as the entirety of my rotation--the former consistently hit for the equivalent of 9999 damage, and the latter every other turn was enough to outheal every boss in the game. Obviously you don't get there witout maxing out a lot of skill classes in the first place, but the end reward for doing so felt pretty underwhelming in so far as it left almost every class nonviable, perhaps even more so than in FF3. That being said, if the franchise hadn't accustomed me to needing to power level to progress, I might have just enjoyed a fun play without the compulsion to seek extra encounters along the way and enjoyed a casual challenge. Having that option is a good thing. I miraculously still had my end game save from like 1998 when I loaded this up, and in that playthrough I was a whopping 20 levels lower at the final boss, 41 vs 61.

Starting 6 tonight probably. This series playthrough is going really fast so far, though that's going to take a hit once I get to 7 and can't fast forward through random encounters anymore.

1. Final Fantasy IV: huge turning point in the series for depth of play; phenomenal soundtrack; breaks away from the all-encompassing black and white good vs evil pitch to give characters points of internal conflict; enemy battle sprites are infused with Yoshitaka Amano's twisted and bizarre style to feel really creepy in spite of early SNES graphics; first game to attempt actual character development, with lots of compelling twists as characters you begin to bond with suddenly keel over

2. Final Fantasy V: reverts to a more cliche approach from the start compared to 4. Heroes and villains are defined immediately and never waver. Some death events are just happening for the sake of maintaining an established "kill everyone non-essential" cliche approach to tragedy. A general feeling that the game was a bit of a rush job. Good character development in the main cast though, presents the heroes in a more casual light. Ample cut scenes project the cast as a band of relatively normal people experiencing joy and sorrow as opposed to battle-hardened veterans. Establishes an intimate bond between them that doesn't feel cliche. Job system is diversified and less tedious than previous installments that used it, although by the end most classes are overwhelmingly inferior to the best options.

3. Final Fantasy III: Fun prototype to the series. First game to really immerse you in the flavor of the franchise and not just feel like a generic RPG. Not sure how much I enjoyed it independently, but it was fun seeing so many elements of the future franchise find their footing for the first time. By far my favorite of the NES titles. Still completely devoid of character development (the cast don't even have names), but the environment is unique and the mechanics, music, and art come together to really feel like Final Fantasy for the first time in hindsight.

4. Final Fantasy I: Nothing I couldn't have thrown together in RPG Maker. Really just a mechanical procedure of fighting mobs and piecing together some really obscure hints to figure out where you're supposed to go next. Competitive with other RPGs of its day, but doesn't stand the test of time. Boring, really.

5. Final Fantasy II: This game was bad. No getting around it. The skill raising system is god-awful and requires endless mindless grinding with no room for enjoyment. First attempt to create a plot (yes the characters actually have names) falls off a cliff. Like, Leon goes from being your unskilled childhood friend to the supreme evil leader of Team Evil over night with no freaking plot justification and then rejoins you as the prodigal son presumably only because his quest for world domination didn't quite pan out. Attempts at character development are so superficial that the simple fact that they have names is their most meaningful identifying features. Yet I do remember the story better than FF3's; it did at least attempt to have one. Unfortunately it wasn't nearly enough, and almost all other features of the game were bad.

Kind of unreal how much better FF6 turned out to be than any game in the series before it. That's not to say the older games were weak, but so much more went into crafting 6. It's on a completely different level, and they accomplished that without a system upgrade.

First of all, I was shocked by how little I remembered of this game. I had to check my notes (yes I started keeping logs of this crap when I was like 8), and I'd only ever beaten FF7 twice as a kid, compared to say, 7 runs of FF6, Chrono Trigger, and Suikoden. Many aspects of it were very much a novel experience for me.

My eyes adjusted to the poor quality of the CG, but I never got completely used to all of the characters being boxes. Compared to FF6 maxing out the SNES's potential, it was just a little rough. That certainly wasn't a game ender though.

As a kid, I loved the Shinra. They had so many characters, and it was really their collapse from power that I took as the focal plot of the game. I think my imagination imbued them with a lot more personality than they actually had. As an adult, I found them a lot more 1-dimentional. The Turks are still cool guys just doing their jobs, but Heidegger, Scarlet, Palmer, they were all essentially chaotic evil types. Rufus was evil. Hojo was evil. Tseng was evil. Reeve is really the only normal guy with human emotions, and he spends most of the game in the avatar of a freaking stuffed animal. No, the Shinra weren't half as fun as I remembered. They were pretty shallow. A lot of that enemy-of-my-enemy empathy I thought I remembered never really blossoms. They're too busy going GYAHAHAHA when buildings topple over. It's a wonder they even bothered to fight the Weapons; I think most of them would have enjoyed watching Junon and Midgar burn. At least a lot of the nameless every day soldiers and employees you encounter had a human side.

On the other hand, the more integral theme of the fight to save the planet made more sense to me. It was also kind of shallow and vague (ok so there's this thing that exists that is Jenova that destroys planets but the planet has a big white ball of stuff and some monsters that will fight it and if a Cetra prays to it it will turn green and Jenova's meteor can only be stopped by green glowing things not white ones), but as a kid I just remember going huh? and ignoring it. Um... I don't know if that's a good thing, it's just a thing.

I did appreciate the playable characters a lot more than I used to. I ended up rolling with Barret and Tifa all game just like I used to, but I wanted to put Cid in my party too. I wanted to put Red XIII in my party. I felt like they all had well developed personalities except Vincent, and all but him and Yuffie had a clear reason to fight by my side. (Interestingly enough, Vincent and Yuffie were my least favorite characters as a kid too.) I think Barret and Cid especially shined to me in a way I wasn't able to appreciate when I was younger. Like Barret was always the tough guy, but it never sunk in before that the dude's a freaking terrorist. He's killed thousands of innocent civilians for his political cause. He's really not a "good guy" in the classic sense. He's uneducated and radicalized, and Tifa and Cloud aren't much better. Cid and Red are more the brains of the operation, and Cid's got his own agenda that only gradually comes in line with the interests of the planet. Not the pure, selfless heroes we're used to at all. I really liked that.

The scene where a Weapon attacks Junon was freaking epic.

The materia system was kind of fun in itself, but made the game comically easy. I made almost no effort to power up my characters (didn't even bother with the whole chocobo breeding crap to get Knights of the Round and some of the top tier materia) and bosses were still barely scratching me. About the only times I stopped to think about what actions I needed to take were learning the Midgar Zolom's enemy skill early and in the final dungeon when I ended up sticking myself with nothing but Cloud and an underleveled Vincent to fight off enemies that used instant death crap after I hadn't been able to save my game for two hours. (I assumed the party split would require me to actually play each of them, so I sent off the characters that were actually prepared for it into different groups.) Basic physical attacks took out just about any average monster. Bosses were quickly shut down with limit breaks and summons. I beat Sephiroth while I thought the fight was still just warming up. Dude just kind of rolls over and dies as long as you use a megalixir after his ultimate ability.

On the whole though, I really did like it, and it was tastefully brief (my timer was somewhere between 35 and 40 hours). It's hard to even relate it to the other games. Definitely not as good as 6. Did I like it as much as 4? They're so radically different. Classic high fantasy vs steampunk fantasy. The latter naturally appeals to me more, and I want to say yeah I enjoyed this more than 4, with a caveat that 4 had significantly better music and that factor is pretty relevant to my overall enjoyment.

So where am I at in rankings now, eh?

Something like
6
7
4
3
5
1
2

And now it's time for the real test. I've been looking forward to this a lot. As a teenager I hated FF8. I thought it was really emo and sappy and I just couldn't enjoy anything about it outside of the card game. I know it's a lot of people's favorite game in the series. I remember approximately nothing whatsoever about it besides that random encounters level with you (hated that at the time but might like it now) and that Squall says "..." and cries a lot. Will I walk away from this with a radically different opinion, or will I feel about the same now as I did then? I'll start to find out in a few days.

Seriously, though, FF8 is kind of a "Well, we can't top FF7 so let's double down on making teenage hormone levels go through the roof, I dunno, we're getting close to our Logan's Run-inspired retirement ages here" to me

That being said, it does have some of the most killer music and best overall 'world feel.' You know, no chibi tiny people.

The junctioning/leveling/powering up system was great and by far the most fun for me in the series so far. I immediately wanted to start the game over again and see how it performs if you intentionally avoid all experience points. (But I don't have time, so I won't.)

I thought Squall was a very well developed character and I actually liked him a lot. That was probably the biggest difference from my childhood memories of the game.

The music's solid on the whole. I wouldn't say that it grew on me further, in large part because there were a lot of bewildering track selections for particular scenes that clashed heavily with the mood. (Even Liberi Fatali felt very displaced from the video it plays over.)

Almost all of the other characters were horrible. It had the worst plot of any plot-focused game I have ever played. The methods employed for storytelling were often very wonky and left me clueless as to what I was supposed to do next without checking a guide. The world felt extremely empty, clashing hard with the modern settings of most of the towns you visit. (At least on PC) party changes were pretty glitchy and frequently resulted in all of my GFs being removed. When an equipped NPC left the party my magic would randomly redistribute itself between all six characters, and I'd have to resort it manually. Limitations to controller customization made piloting the garden or ragnarok a bit of a pain in the ass.

Really though, the black abyss of a plot made all of the smaller faults feel more severe than they should have. Every piece was tethered on with an arbitrary thread of nonsense and no regard for whether it generated a coherent story. Even if you accept the frequented "if you wish upon a star your dreams come true" excuse to resolve impossibly lost causes, the game leaves you with endless logical absurdities if taken at face value. Was Cid Kramer completely chill with learning that his wife is a mass murderer because he is a closet sadist? Did Irvine pretend he didn't know any of his childhood friends because he wanted to exploit Selfie's memory loss to get into her pants? Of course the answer is just they didn't even bother to try to make this stuff make any sense.

A friend of mine who calls FF8 his favorite in the series offered a unique interpretation of it that resonated really well with me, though I would be surprised and impressed if it was the developers' actual intent. He felt most of the characters and broader story could be safely ignored as an ambiguous artistic backdrop to the main plot, which was Squall's transformation into Seifer by way of the antagonist Rinoa. At the start of the game, he's the level headed leader making all of the right decisions and staying focused while his coworkers are acting impulsively and screwing it all up. All game long they show him no respect and treat him like he's got some kind of disease. Rinoa enters the scene by making a move on Squall which feels a little less innocent when you learn later on that she was dating Seifer at the time. She gets herself into a position where Seifer has to come to her rescue, and for a time she believes that it got him killed, but that doesn't make her hesitate to start pulling the same moves on Squall. She gets a thrill out of manipulating strong men to jeopardize themselves trying to save her. Throughout the game she is constantly showing up where she shouldn't be when plans seem to be running smoothly and forcing Squall to abandon his mission to come rescue her. She's always manipulating him. He never gives her his ring; she steals it and then convinces him that he wanted her to have it anyway. He never agrees to go to the party in FH; she lies about it and then gaslights him like he'd asked her out on a date or something. She's never really seen trying to befriend him, just constantly flirting. It's a game to her, and she ultimately ends up winning. He falls for her and repeatedly jeopardizes the world at her behest, and by the end of the game he swears to be her knight and protect her even if she becomes an evil sorceress, just as Seifer did with Edea. The game is about Squall's descent from a strong independent leader to Rinoa's broken puppet.

I rather doubt the game was intended to be perceived that way, but if I look at it from that angle it certainly feels a lot more compelling than if I take the game at face value. And there are some interesting unresolved hints that give a dark interpretation some credence. I never understood why you had to name the ring Rinoa stole from Squall, but it was Griever, the same name as Ultimecia's slave GF in the final battle. Coincidence? There's also an odd cyclical component to it that certainly doesn't make any logical sense but doesn't necessarily need to. We learn in the closing scene that Edea absorbed Ultimecia's consciousness as a direct consequence of Squall and co defeating Ultimecia. The end of the story is essentially the catalyst for the beginning of the story. That evil spirit is ultimately passed on to Rinoa. Are the Ultimecia and Griever that you fight in the final battle supposed actually be Rinoa and Squall thousands of years removed from where the game ends?

[Hidden link. Register to see links.] Apparently Square confirmed that it was not their intention but some people involved liked it enough that they said they would consider alluding to that possibility more if they remade the game.

For all that FF8's plot is bad, I have had a great deal of fun talking about and reading other people's interpretations of it. My default approach to life is if it feels shallow and half-assed Occam's Razor says I'm not missing something and it's just not a very good story. But that doesn't prevent us from playing the game of asking what if this all somehow makes sense.

In that regard (and coupled with the truly innovative leveling system) I definitely enjoyed my play through FF8. You might say I enjoyed it for the wrong reasons, but as a medium of entertainment a fun experience is a fun experience.

A friend of mine who calls FF8 [...] descent from a strong independent leader to Rinoa's broken puppet.

Edited for brevity's sake.

This makes it sound like a parody of FF4, which has a very "Red Cross Knight," "Lancelot/Guinnivere" Romantic Swashbuckler Saving The Damsel In Distress angle.

My interpreting, based on all you just wrote, is that they basically had to try so hard not to repeat story beats from FF7 that the plot became totally incoherent and was unsalvagable by the time production began. But hey, them action figures sure sold well.

This is probably the point at which the team that began the series started getting utterly disgusted with it, if I were to hazard a guess.

I mean FF4 was a lot more classic and didn't need to try to avoid stereotypes; it was openly embracing them. The interpretation above is a lot more creative than that, and realistic too in isolation from the rest of the game. I just think that's more likely my friend's fancy than the developers' intent.

FF8 takes fate/destiny to the point of parody with all of the cast growing up together and just magically coincidentally ending up fighting together without a plot-relevant reason to unite them. A ton of progressions in the game came out of nowhere. Like maybe there were some out of the way NPCs I didn't talk to in Eshar, but I recall being told to go to x location to meet with Ellone. I expected to find her sitting in a house somewhere and all of a sudden my party loads a space ship and launches off to the moon like this was totally normal and expected. Cid cannot generate an emotional reaction to finding out that his wife is an evil witch killing thousands of people, to finding out that I killed the owner of his school who just happened to be a giant mutant blob, etc. Rinoa literally stops breathing for a very long time and they dodge the inevitable death by allowing Squall to magically will fresh oxygen into her tank. Squall takes a day to recover from a superficial wound on his face but brushes off a six inch wide projectile blasting through his chest and out the other side like it's nothing. The game was junk on the surface and there's really no disputing that.

It's still an entertaining thought experiment to try to come up with some sort of coherent explanation for it all.

Originally Posted by ThiefsHitRate

yer so analytical

sometimes ya gotta let art just wash over you

That's how I approach pretty much everything initially. Still have to word a bit if I want to discuss it afterwards. :P